My City

Sunday and the twenty-eighth Covid blog. 🍁

Yesterday, I finally visited our capital by train and with love I walked her streets. I use the pronoun ‘her’ as I feel a female heart and soul. A mother who weeps and rejoices with us, her children.

We, who build and tear her apart and love the very bones of her intricate veins and vessels. How much she sees; love, greed, hate, war, poverty and disease yet she is our constant and we flock to drink in her ugliness but more importantly, her eternal beauty.

I saw both yesterday on my journey. The ignorance of strangers, masked yet uncovered and reminded that while we were on lockdown and in the safety of our homes there were those without. The homeless, who beg on the underground for kindness, those who are now living with less protection during this pandemic.

I saw the beauty of why I love our city and I felt her heart beat. The young guy next to me on the tube, shuffling a deck of cards with a dexterity I can only dream of. Another wearing a gold embroidered waistcoat and top hat. A young striking Amazonian girl with long titian plaits, thick black tights and the shortest of shorts, making male heads turn with every assured and confident step.

I have missed this quirkiness, this, that has always made me feel I am home.

This week I have been teaching Dickens, a man who is synonymous with our city, who describes her streets with such vivid imagery.
When I think of Dickens’ London I think of St Paul’s. A female heart, looking over her inhabitants. I think her so very beautiful and majestic, so full of love yet pained. I imagine each considered tear, from each and every generation as it flows into the River Thames before her.

For me she is the very heart of our city, watching with pride and with fear.

And whenever I am in her presence, I feel her.

From Dickens to Dickinson and the main reason for my visit yesterday; to listen, to learn and to watch her poetry performed.

An event celebrating her work and her unique glory.
I learned so very much, not just about Emily Dickinson but about myself, it is why I love poetry.

I have always favoured Dickinson’s poem ‘Hope is a Feather’ the idea that it never dies but when you hear it read aloud and with passion, it’s form takes on a renewed meaning.

Poetry is meant to be performed and not just read, without, you can not hear it’s rhythm something I feel very strongly about and being in the presence of two poets yesterday who have that understanding, filled me with absolute joy.

A poet I had not seen before but knew of, performed a reading from her newly published verse novel. Nikita Gill, a young woman born in Ireland to Indian parents. Her accent was rich and beautiful and she talked about how special Grandmothers are, how they particularly enrich their Grandchildrens lives with wisdom and love but how sad it is, that they grow old and Grandchildren do not get to see the best of them.

This so made me think and my eyes filled with the tears of this truth. I did not get to know my own Grandma, she died when I was very small, I know of her, I feel close to her but I did not get the privilege of ‘knowing’ her.
I do however, have the letters she wrote to me as a child:

“My Darling Joy, a wee robin I met on the stairs told me you have been a very good girl”

These precious words are my memories of love. I did not get to share in the best of her.

It made me think of my own mortality and the lives of my own Grandchildren and of future Grandchildren, that they too will not remember.

They will not remember when they are grown, how we pretended to be butterflies, floating around flapping our wings. It is I who will remember, each scream of laughter, they will not. Too young, for these memories to embed in their not yet fully formed brains.

This is the thing I love, when I attend these events, that I am sent on unexpected paths. I did not imagine for one moment yesterday that I would learn so very much.

There were many other paths of knowledge and of unexplored avenues. I hope that I will always be open enough to never stop learning and discovering. We learn so much from others and sometimes the smallest idea is the biggest source of change.

This train of thought has encouraged me to now write of this, so that when my bones too begin to crumble, they may not remember, but will understand ‘the best of me.’

I hope you have a magical week, one of discovery and learning and life and love, it is our everything.

Stay Safe,

Joy xxx